American Food

I am certain that we have said that we are really enjoying the food here in Brazil. We haven't tried anything that was bad so far and in fact, we eat rice and beans with almost every meal. Ok, with that said, we have been missing some of our comfort food from the States. One of our favorite meals was baked pork tenderloin, Grandmother's homemade mac-and-cheese, skillet fried green beans & yeast rolls. Needless to say, we haven't eaten this meal in about 5 months. One of the problems is that we don't have a lot of pork products in the grocery stores, but I found a grocery store that had a pork tenderloin (that isn't what it was called, but that's what it was). So, I began my quest to make our favorite American meal. The mac-and-cheese was going to be the challenge because Grandmother uses a can of Campbell's cheddar cheese soup and a can of Campbell's tomato soup. Campbell's soup is hard to come by here and if you find it, you will pay 6 or 7 dollars for it. So, we haven't had Campbell's soup since we have been here, and that has been ok with us. I knew I was going to have to be creative, so I found some individual serving instant soups. I found a 4 cheese soup and a tomato with a little bit of macaroni. I prepared these two soups and we pretended that it was Campbell's. I mixed everything up and put it in the oven and we all watched and waited. 20 minutes later when I pulled it from the oven, we were all exstatic. It wasn't exact, but it was very close and very good. The green beans would be no problem, but we haven't made them like we did at home since we have been here. Finally the yeast rolls, well they don't have Sister Schubert's here as you guessed, but we have a bread store on every corner. I knew I could find a soft yeast roll somewhere and do you believe that I found them at the same market that I found the tenderloin. We were so excited. So, Paul did the tenderloin just like he did back home, and I took care of the rest. When we sat down to eat dinner tonight, you would have thought that we hadn't eaten in months. We didn't realize how much we missed our home cooking until we had a taste of something that we haven't tasted in a while. So, I just wanted to share with you that tonight we had a little piece of home right in the middle of Brazil.